Sketch, an awesome alternative for new upcoming designers

As my first post back on here in a few years I thought I'd share some of my latest research on tools.

Some of you may already have started working with this, but Sketch is a phenomenal tool for anybody designing for web or mobile. Started looking in to it around 4 months ago, trialling it with live projects at my company and generally all thumbs are most definitely up.

The main advantage is how much faster my process has become. As well as it being easier for me as a designer, UX are able to use it for wireframe and developers can also get a great amount from the designs using sketch to speed up their UI builds.

All tools are contextual to your needs so no cluttered screens, just what you need when you need it. As well as that doing other simple things like filling loads of areas with random images has got a whole lot easier because of a plugin that handles that for you (no more going to google, searching for a good image, copying pasting and repeating the process 10 times!).

When it comes to plugins there are an insane amount. The first stop is to download Sketch Toolbox, this is basically a library of all plugins where you can install them from straight away.

Generally anything can be done in Sketch that you might have done in Photoshop / Illustrator before but of course they still have their uses. I still use Photoshop for image manipulation and Illustrator for iconography as it has a lot more tools for that specific need. The functionality is very much the same to what you would be used to but it still takes a short while to get used to everything as well as new short keys etc.

Lastly forget paying a bomb for Adobe products, Sketch comes in at cheap (compared to Adobe) price of Â£60!

If anybody is just starting out or has any more questions I'm happy to answer them, for now here are some useful links for Sketch.